Monday, 21 April 2014

Autofiction

Try as I might I cannot get it out of my
head that Kanehara is, at least partially, the real-life inspiration for
Fuka-Eri in 1Q84. And that, you’ll
understand, creates all sorts of associations and images in my head, very few
of which are anything other than uncomfortable.

It’s not like Autofiction isn’t difficult to get a hold on in the first place,
either. At only 200 (small) pages it’s a very compact little novella (or whatever
they’re called now. Novelette? Noveltini? Fun-size Novel?), and there’s a lot
of curious stuff going on with the nature of fiction and the meta-narratives
authors bring to bear as they write their worlds and, to a certain extent,
themselves. Kanehara teases us with hints that this might be at least
semi-autobiographical only to muddy the waters completely and deliberately by
having her narrator (Rin, a high-school dropout author like Kanehara herself)
openly lying about her biography when asked to write it.

‘It’s
all a lie, of course,’ I add.

‘I
thought so.’

We
both laugh and I down my champagne.

We then progress backwards through the
narrator’s formative years (a structural trick which would have been perhaps
more diverting if I hadn’t just reread Use
of Weapons) in order to find out exactly what real/fabricated incidents
have caused this real/fabricated character to end up so damaged.

Because she is damaged, and this is why it’s
hard to talk this book up as anything more than an interesting exercise in
metafictional identity: it’s just impossible to care about Rin or what happens
to her. The best unreliable narrators have this slow-build offness about them –
early on they’re just plausible enough that you want to believe them later when
the more blatant untruths come tumbling out – but Rin goes from 0 to Psycho in
less than 3.5 pages. Her entire character is posited on being hysterically
unhinged, and that doesn’t leave much for the reader. It’s not, of course,
necessary to like every character, but some
sort of connection is necessary and there just wasn’t any here for me. You
need some kind of a way in to the character or the story. I’ve seen Kanehara
compared to Ryu Murakami before, and I can certainly see that there are some
similarities, but Murakami at least remembers to throw in some jokes every once
in a while. Some would have been very welcome here to leaven the on occasion
frankly tedious drunken introspection that’s sometimes thrust upon us for page
after page. The constant musings on suicide and rape don’t come across as
shocking so much as dull. I guess there’s an argument to be made that in
presenting this milieu in such an uncritically detached manner it’s rendered
all the more shocking – the horrific through being rendered mundane becomes
even more terrifying – but that doesn’t work either.

Her daddy didn’t love her, basically, and
while I wouldn’t wish to belittle the damaging effects that may have on real
people in the real world, it doesn’t work as a narrative hook in Autofiction no matter how much Kanehara
might try to co-opt some of the patina of true-life to provide some interest. I
can’t entirely dismiss this book, as there is always that through-going tension
between the real and the fictional and how we chose to perform our identities
for ourselves and others, but without that frankly there’s not much here. Misery meta-memoir clearly isn’t my thing.